


No Man's Sky

by goldfusion



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Boss Levi, Dating, Drinking, F/M, Fluff, Gaming, Neighbors, Romantic Fluff, Video & Computer Games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 17:37:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10881699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfusion/pseuds/goldfusion
Summary: She was an unpredictable summer thunderstorm. He was a constant light drizzle.“Do you mind if I climb over your balcony?”





	No Man's Sky

She was an unpredictable summer thunderstorm. He was a constant light drizzle. She was an editor, a challenger, a ghost of wilderness that haunted the urban scene. He was an executive director, a nine-to-five worker, a man with a suit and tie constantly crisp and fresh and clean. She liked playing video games after half a bottle of Jack Daniels. He liked seeing his username ranked first on the score board. 

They met through her forgetfulness. When Levi returned home nearly 10pm, he found a girl slouched against the apartment door next to his. Her hair was hastily put up in a messy knot. She had on a white button-up, tucked into a dark grey pencil skirt, all wrinkled between her back and her apartment door. She sat cross-legged with her worn out Chucks. The combination of Converse and business attire was what made his gaze linger. 

When she heard his footsteps, she looked up, her (e/c) eyes vibrant against his grey ones. She had a can of beer in her hand.  
“Hey,” she greeted him as she got up on her feet. Her voice was light and cheerful.  
“Hey…” Levi reluctantly replied, having not the slightest clue who this woman was.  
“I live next door,” she explained, flashing a flawless smile while dusting off her butt, “and I forgot my keys.”  
Levi’s suspicion eased, he shifted his bag of store-bought premade food to his left hand as he reached for his keys in his pocket.

“Do you mind if I climb over your balcony?”

He froze for a second, the sound of metal echoed through the hallway as the keys dangled in his hand.  
He met her gaze a second time. “You can,” his said, voice unintentionally impassive, though his usual deadpan of a face softened, “but isn’t that a little dangerous?”  
“I’ll be fine,” she replied, her voice trailing off on a high note.  
He nodded as he opened the door. She marched into his apartment after him, following him to his balcony.

“Thanks,” she mumbled with one foot on the railing of the veranda.  
He watched her back intently, muscles tense, ready to launch himself at her should she falter the slightest.

But she was more than graceful when she hurled herself over the railing, landing accurately onto her own property. When she stood up, the now empty can of beer still in hand, she turned and waved at him before heading through the sliding doors and disappearing out of sight. 

Levi stood there, staring after her, until many seconds had passed and the light in her apartment flickered on. 

She was pretty, quirky, and a little strange. Also, he noted after replaying the scene of her launching over the balcony, her underwear was black. 

The same evening a week later, he had begun to wonder when he’d run into his neighbour again, when he heard a knock on his door. He had changed out of his work clothes, and was sporting some grey sweatpants and a black V-neck. 

Off course, she was there when he answered, this time, she had her hair done up neatly, the bags under her eyes covered by the perfect shade of concealer, and her lips were graced with a wine coloured lipstick. Below her silky blouse and navy trousers, she still had on her old Converse.

“Hello,” she smiled, lips curling perfectly, to which he replied with a small smile of his own, “have you had dinner yet?”

It was past midnight.

Levi leaned himself against his doorway. The distance between him and his visitor drawing a little closer than he had intended. She didn’t falter the slightest, her (e/c) orbs vibrant and unyielding.  
Seeing the plastic bag in her hand, he lied, “No, I haven’t.”

“Good,” she replied, delighted, “I bought some sushi and liquor, and also the new game No Man’s Sky, care to join me?”

Her toothy smile was dazzling. Levi felt compelled to smile back, it was contagious. “Um,” the man let out a low chuckle. Laughter was a thing his body was not accustomed to. “Sure”.

She stepped back and toward her own apartment, keys already in hand. He followed suit.

“Just think of this as a token of my gratitude,” she said as she fumbled with the lock, and when it clicked, added “I cleaned my room, don’t worry.”

The apartment was smaller than his, and while it did look like she gave some last-ditched effort to organize the piles of magazines and video games scattered about the living room floor, it was not clean. At least not compared to his anyway.

Levi wondered about the room gingerly, afraid to disturbed the organized mess. She was behind the kitchen counter, freeing the boxes of low quality sushi from the plastic bag. She also pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels. 

While she was reaching for beer from the fridge, he remarked, “you have a lot of magazines”, notably a lot of issues of the same magazine.  
“I’m an editor,” she responded as she placed the various kinds of alcohol and plastic containers of sushi on the coffee table, along with two shot glasses.

“Are you a gamer?” she asked half-heartedly, turning on the PS4 that was placed on the floor under her flat screen.

“Yeah,” he admitted, picking up the DVD case labeled “No Man’s Sky”, the art was quite impressive. “But I haven’t played this one,” he added.  
“Hmmm..” she turned back to face him, opening a can of beer and bringing it to her lips before mumbling, “What do you play?”  
Levi got a can of his own, chugged half of it, and answered half-heartedly, “I don’t know.”  
She chuckled, “what do you mean you don’t know? Like what, FPS?”  
He nodded.  
She giggled to herself and shook her head, mumbling something under her breath he could not hear.

They spent the night getting tipsy and exploring the universe. He named planets after people and places, and she named them after the underdogs of the material world. It was easy to distinguish, his were planets called “Zeus” or “Nagoya”, and hers were planets named “Fish Tacos” or “Toe Nail Clippings”.

Alcohol really did stimulate creativity.

Normally, games like No Man’s Sky would not be Levi’s cup of tea. There was no defined objective, no competition, and therefore no sense of accomplishment. Though he hated to admit it, he liked the gamer clichés: Counter Strike, Call of Duty, and the new Star Wars. He was pretty much a stereotype.

She was all that he was not. She didn’t need to vent her stress through virtual reality violence. Game art and animation were the most important. She never paid attention to score boards or kill streaks. She played all her games tipsy.

Despite that, Levi still went out and bought himself No Man’s Sky the next day on his way home from work. In fact, he had to visit three different shops to find one that wasn’t sold out. He almost pulled an all-nighter trying to fulfill his purpose as a hitchhiker in the galaxy that first night. He popped open a bottle of whisky that had been collecting dust in his cabinet since the dawn of time, and named his first planet after the girl next door.

He told her about his purchase over dinner, which he had invited her to when they ran into each other again one morning before work. His coworkers (namely Hanji) would go nuts if they ever found out Levi asked a girl to dinner.

She was wearing a black jump suit with heels and bright red lipstick, looking fierce and powerful and oh-so-beautiful. 

She was delighted. “I didn’t think you were the type to play those games,” she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, “What did you name your first planet?”  
Levi was not prepared for that. The tips of his ears flushed pink. “Um,” he must have looked surprised, “I named it…Chuck Taylor”.  
She frowned in bemusement, “What?”  
“Oh, you know,” he looked down at his plate, desperately trying to keep his cool, “it’s just…a thing,” he failed.  
She laughed it off, not pressing him any further.

They bonded, for the first time, over things beyond video games. Her favourite flavour of ice cream. His collection of cufflinks. Existential despair. Childhood memories. Allergies. His feelings of tender curiosity found its shoring and morphed, without warning, into a heat wave, a revelation. He fell in love. That was a first too.

One night she called him out of the blue just to ask what he was doing.  
“I’m playing No Man’s Sky,” he couldn’t stop the smile from creeping up his visage. It was a good feeling to have someone call just to ask what you were doing.  
“Hey what a coincidence!” her voice was very high pitched, “me too!”  
Levi hesitated before asking, “are you tipsy again?”  
“Uh-huh,” she didn’t even bother to hide it.  
“Why do you always play while intoxicated?” he finally thought to ask.  
“Well,” she began, he could hear the background music from the game playing through the phone, “reality is really demoralizing when you’re sober.”  
“What does that mean?”  
She paused to think, “It’s that kind of thing you know. Apparently, there are 18 quintillion planets you can explore in this game.”  
“Okay…” he ensured her he was still listening.  
“That’s already such an unfathomable number, but in reality, there’s probably more planets out there,” she continued. “We spend our entire lives being indoctrinated with the brilliance of humanity, but that brilliance is actually nothing but a speck of dust”.

Levi paused, processing. “You are very well-articulated for a drunk person,” was his reply.  
She giggled, “well I’ll have you know that I have a master’s degree in English lit and culture”.  
He let out an exhale of laughter, “impressive.”

The line fell silent. Neither of them knew what to say.

“Sometimes I think people are like that too,” it was she who broke the silence, continuing with her drunken philosophical generalizations about human existence, “do you know the book Kafka on the Shore?”  
Her brain made pretty big leaps when she was drunk. “No,” he replied simply.  
The background music from the game was no longer echoing through the phone, replacing it were the low hum of traffic and voices of urban life.  
“Well, it’s by this Japanese author – Murakami,” she continued, “he wrote about this myth, where humans used to have two heads and two hearts, but because the gods feared our strength and power, they cut us in half, so now we have to spend our entire lives searching for our other half.”  
“That’s very poetic,” Levi stood up to stretch.  
“But according to No Man’s Sky,” her voice sounded a little distant, muffled by background noises and blurred by wires transmitting telephone signals, “you will never find your other half. Because it’s simply statistically impossible. They say it’ll take 5 billion years to explore every planet in the game, that’s simply too many life times. We can’t afford that.”  
“But it’s happened,” Levi interrupted, remembering the Google headline, “on the first day of its release, in fact. One player landed on another player’s planet. They contacted each other to meet up at the same location in the game,” he seemed so eager to prove something.  
She became interested, “did they?”  
“Yeah,” Levi switched the phone to his left hand, “but apparently they couldn’t see or interact with each other. The game didn’t support multiplayer I guess.”  
She took some time to think, "well, at least our world supports multiplayer."  
"What?"  
"Cause I can see and interact with you."  
"Well, if you put it that way, I guess..."

There was a long pause. 

Levi became distracted by the background noise on her end. “Hello? Where are you?” he was a little concerned. She was drunk after all.  
She didn’t reply for a while.

“On my balcony.”

He was slightly taken aback. Without a word, Levi pulled open the glass doors beside his living room and stepped out into the chilly evening air.

“Hey,” her voice synced with the copy of it echoing through his phone. She waved. Her hair was down and flowing through the breeze.

It was a mirrored image of the night many days before, she had one foot over the railing. Without warning, she made a leap, the light from her phone screen illuminating Levi’s visage as she landed on his balcony and stumbled into his arms.

A moment of silence passed before he sighed in relief, “we have to stop meeting like this,” he chuckled, “what were you doing out here?”

“Looking for my other half,” she mumbled sleepily, wrapping her arms around him, head resting on his chest.

“I found you.”


End file.
